Exercise

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Here is how to actually do this on your own board, and how the teams in the room worked through it.

First, put up the 4U’s and, for your idea, write down one concrete reason it’s unworkable, unavoidable, urgent, or underserved. Selene Health walked through all four cleanly: unworkable (when menopause symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats hit, they sharply reduce women’s ability to function, so they can’t work); unavoidable (menopause and aging are simply a reality for half the room); urgent (when symptoms hit, it’s as urgent as needing medicine for the flu, and people stop going to work); and underserved (search for pregnancy research and you get billions of results, but for menopausal-age women barely one in a hundred; only about 2% of research funding is devoted to this population). All four U’s felt very real, and many women in the room nodded in recognition. That’s what a great “for who” problem looks like.

Then do the same on the 3D’s: get your Disruptive, Discontinuous, and Defensible up on the board. Consumer products are notoriously hard to defend, yet Taste of Kenya found an answer: 10-year contracts with farmers that lock in supply so others can’t easily compete. Space Health is disruptive simply because space itself is a new, scary, whole disruptive industry that changes the notion that we’re bound to our planet, opening new industries and materials. Cohort is discontinuous because what used to be analog education is being turned digital (analog-to-digital is a perfect example of a discontinuity). Sharon’s new bike seat looked hard to defend until you learn it measures data while the seat is ridden and changes its form on the fly, so it’s defensible both through IP and, over time, through data (women’s bike-health issues are badly understudied, so there isn’t enough data out there, which makes hers valuable), potentially reinforced by long-term contracts with bike-share companies.

Finally, share your “aha” moments. One team’s biggest aha was recognizing that their problem might be solved by new government policy rather than a startup at all, an honest, valuable realization worth a round of applause (don’t spend your life building a company for a problem better solved by lobbying inside government). Dan’s TerraFlow aha was reframing the customer: not “cancer” in the abstract, but the individual scientist who convinced Pharma to fund an expensive trial and now has an unavoidable need to prove to their VP it was worth it, because if the drug fails to reach market for want of the right biomarkers, the loss is in the billions. The exercise works because it forces you to state the problem in terms your buyer will instantly recognize as urgent and unavoidable.